


Without Borders

by scuttlesworth



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Character Death, Gen, Medicine Sans Frontiers, doctors without borders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-21
Updated: 2013-04-21
Packaged: 2017-12-09 01:55:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/768622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scuttlesworth/pseuds/scuttlesworth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Medicine Sans Frontiers always needs doctors willing to travel to difficult places. Without Sherlock, John needs a place to get away from London to and someone to need him. So he goes to the Sudan, and he minute he gets there he gets his ass chewed out by Nurse Morstan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Without Borders

It is hotter than he had imagined it would be. 

He looked at a map before they left. He studied the average temperatures, compared them to Afghanistan. He knew Afghanistan was milder, but this is insanity. The heat ripples under his feet, up his pant legs, the bottom of his chin. The sun is at zenith, and the radiant glare off the ground is enough to bake cookies. He drinks quickly from his bottle. Water has never seemed so precious. 

The ground is hard, sandy dirt packed down to the density of concrete. He imagines the glass that could be made from all this sand. You could build cathedrals of it. The path of the land rover driving away leaves a dusty cloud behind it. He is very, very alone, here. 

One of the concrete block buildings disgorges a woman. He can tell she’s a woman long before he can clearly see anything else about her. Her silhouette, curved; the strength of her stride. Her skin is the color of oiled mahogany, her eyes flash with life. He is half-smitten before the words come out of her mouth. 

“Idiot!” she shouts into the sun-dead mid-day air. “These medicines can’t be left here! Get moving, the heat will spoil them. You are a dunce, yes? Grab those boxes! Follow.” She lifts two heavy boxes stuffed with antibiotics, antimalarials, antivirals, saline solution. He can’t help watching her arms, her back as she moves. She’s a goddess. He’s bright red with the heat and possibly dying. He shoulders his bag and grabs two boxes, stumbles after her. 

Inside, the darkness and relative coolness are a shock. He manages not to drop anything. She shouts commands and a group of people, sitting around what looks like a waiting room, spring up from their seats and stream outside. Several leave children behind to gawp at the strange man. Those who head out to help give him curious looks as they go. 

There is a counter that splits the room. It’s topped with an ancient formica. One half, the half he’s standing in, is an open room with a linoleum floor and a bunch of chairs that remind him of shoolhouse chairs from his childhood. The other half looks like an office; the counter fronts a desk, and a couple other desks sit behind it. There are ancient computers there. Ceiling fans stir the air overhead, slowly. The windows are covered by wooden-slat blinds. Fly paper twists slowly from a thread in one corner; there are posters on the walls with pictures. How to use a condom, how to wash your hands. No words on the posters. Literacy here isn’t common. 

The boxes of medicine go on the counter. Off in the back corner is a pair of ancient refrigerators. Large steel hasps hang from the front, padlocks dangling open. Mary heads around behind the counter, starts yanking the boxes open and pulling out medicine to stuff it into the fridge. Feeling somewhat averse to going back out into the sun, he yanks open a box of his own and starts handing her medicine as it comes out. She mutters a running count of what they pull out. Not in English, and it takes him a minute to understand that it’s Arabic. The accent is so very different from what he remembers up in Afghanistan. 

It takes awhile to finish, even with the other people hauling in the other boxes. Fingers touch his shirtsleeves, feeling the material as he drinks from his bottle of water. He’s almost out of water. The boxes vanish, broken down and distributed among the crowd; cardboard might be a useful thing to some of these people, he thinks. Feels suddenly guilty for the cartons of chinese food he threw away, in his other life. (A dark-haired shadow in his memory huddles over a plate beside him in a dim apartment, waving chopsticks.) Goosebumps run down his spine despite the heat. 

A man standing off to the side asks a question; the woman shakes her head. Squares her shoulders,stands in front of him with her hands on her hips. Her expression is fierce. Everyone falls silent, a watching audience. It’s obvious who’s in charge here. “Now, you. Who are you, out here? Some charity case do-gooder?” Her accent is liquid, glorious. He looks up at her in delight. 

“Doctor John Watson,” he replies, trying to keep the smile off his face. “Medicine Sans Frontiers. I’m supposed to be working with the clinic.” He looks around. There, behind the counter, is a hallway on the right leading back into dimness. He assumes that’s where the surgery is. “They said I’d have a point of contact. Nurse Morstan?” He smiles up, and she stares at him in disbelief. The two other women and the children gaze wide eyed at this small sweaty stranger with the dirty blond hair. One woman claps her hand over her mouth, eyes flickering between the new white doctor and the nurse. Then Mary laughs. 

Her eyes scrunch nearly shut, her cheeks are round and gleaming with sweat and her whole body shakes with mirth. One of the front teeth is chipped. “Nurse Mary Morstan, yes. that’s me. We were not expecting you yet!” She claps him on the left shoulder. “As-salam alaykom, Doctor John Watson.” 

“Wa alakom as-salam,” he replies. “Not expecting me? I thought I was on time. I’m not early?” 

She grabs his arm and steers him back, through the crowd who are laughing and chattering with nervous relief and towards the back. She waves towards one of the desks as they pass. “This is your desk. No, no, not early, just on time! The fridge, you saw - Bakti, watch the front while I show him the rest?” A tall boy with a shaved head and thin face nods seriously. Mary hauls him back down the hall. “This is room one, for pregnancies. We even have an ultrasound here; we are very fortunate. It’s simply that nothing is ever on time here; this is the Sudan, and things do not happen as they do in other places. This is room two, for injuries.” 

There’s a microwave in this room; John blinks, but she’s steering him so quickly he barely has time to register it. “This is room three, for patients who sleep overnight; room four is the same. Here is the bathroom, it has a shower; sometimes you have to make the patients shower before you can treat them, if they are very dirty. This is the storage closet - we have lots of cloth - and this is the staff room.” There’s a cot in the staff room, and an assault rifle propped in the corner, and a couple of lockers. The assault rifle looks like an AK. He is obscurely relieved; he's used an AK before. 

She whirls them around and steers them back to the main room. She claps her hands, and the chatter dies down; he’s standing beside her, small and blinking as everyone looks at them. “Right! This is your first patient. Aunt Lala?” An older woman shuffles forwards, smiling hugely. Mary bends and speaks to her gently. John understands the words Doctor, treatment, infection, and clean. Then Mary has turned back to the group and is talking to them, and Aunt Lala is smiling up at him, and apparently he’s going to start right away. 

Trial by fire, he thinks, and shakes his head as he laughs. “As-salam alaykom, Aunt Lala,” he says mildly, and steers her back towards the exam rooms. He pauses between rooms one and two. Surely, with half her teeth missing and so much grey in her hair, she doesn’t go into the pregnancy room? She walks into room two ahead of him, taking the decision out of his hands. Injury, then. He follows. 

The microwave is for heating up a wet cloth so you can clean injuries or apply heat to an infected area. It doubles as a way to boil water to sterilize thread for stitches, and a way to heat water for tea. The day is an endless promenade of the injured, the pregnant, and the ill. A couple hours in Mary laughingly tells him that half the village has come out to see him; he lances boils and cleans them with alcohol, cleans and stitches gashes, prescribes from his brand-new (and suddenly looking a good deal smaller than he would need) limited stock of antibiotics, listens to fetal heartbeats. 

Mary stops him in the hallway before one patient. “Tuberculosis,” she says quietly. 

He nods. He spent nine months taking the pills in Afghanistan after he got it once; it’s latent, but he isn’t positive what multiple exposures to differing strains will do. Nothing good, surely. He grabs a mask on his way in. 

Evening comes, and their visitors trickle away. He joins Mary and Bakti where they sit in the main room. She is looking up at the lights, where a couple moths chase each other around in circles. Bakti is sitting at a desk, head pillowed on his arms. 

“Someone always sleeps here,” she says softly. He nods where he slumps beside her, exhausted. 

“Guard the drugs,” he agrees. “Who is it tonight?” 

“I would, but your room, it’s not ready yet. Jean-Paul al Radi and his wife Okot, they own the house you’ll be in. We’ll go there, have supper, then come back here; you know how to use a gun?” 

He snorts. “Yes.” She nods, and they sit in silence for a bit. Then she hauls herself to her feet and he drags himself up as well. “Bakti,” she calls softly, and he lifts his head and smiles. “We’ll be back in a bit to relieve you.” He nods, and they walk out into the night together. 

The smells of the air are different, woodsmoke and dust and spices and sweat, shit and goats and black pepper. Even at night it does not get cool; the air remains bathwater warm. The sun isn’t burning down, but mosquitoes whine occasionally at the edges of his hearing, and he thinks of malaria and yellow fever and diseases less common. 

His host home is two blocks away. In the morning, when he had arrived, he hadn’t seen that there were any blocks at all; the clinic sat on the west side of the town, where the road passed by. West of the road was desert. East of the road were houses, and then the Nile; past the Nile were more houses, and then a couple hundred miles of more desert, and then a small city and the Red Sea. 

The closer they get to the Nile, the more trees grow. Water trickles almost silently by in the irrigation ditches that run beside the dirt street. Rich people live by the water; farmers, with a little land and some crops. John’s host is apparently one of these; they walk to a gate in the wall. A small boy sits there on a rock, whacking at it with a stick; when he sees them he shouts and runs for the house. 

The smells of cooking make John’s mouth water. In the heat of the day with the busyness of the patients, all he’d remembered to do was drink water; now his stomach grumbled fiercely. Mary, beside him, laughs a low laugh in the darkness. The door of the house opened at the boy’s shout. Warm light spilled out, and people poured out to meet them; lamps came with the people, and it quickly became apparent that the meal had been held off until they arrived. 

They ate in the courtyard under the stars, with flickering light and laughter; John knew he’d remember who Jean-Paul and Okot were, but the rest were a blur of faces and names. Jean-Paul was a tall, slender man with glasses; he was a teacher at the local school as well as head of the farming household. He was the only other one besides Mary who spoke English fluently. Okot was a beautiful woman in a cotton robe and red headscarf; she ran the house, and after watching a little, John suspected that she did far more of the day-to day running of the farm that Jean-Paul did. 

The table was covered with food, without a square inch to spare. “For you,” Mary murmured in a low tone. John nodded. Mutton stew, spiced chickpeas, beetroot salad, cinnamon tea, something with yogurt and something with corn. A sweet cake at the end. They watched every bite he took; he felt a bit on display, and tried to smile. He nodded enthusiastically as he ate, and hummed with delight. 

“The only school for more than half a hundred miles,” Jean-Paul said with mingled pride and sorrow, as dinner wound down. “Many children from many places come, walk an hour to get here; we have no bus. Some, I think their parents only let them come because we give them milk for lunch.” He shook his head. It wasn’t difficult for John to keep a solemn expression on his face.  
It was, however, difficult to get back to the clinic. “Bakti is waiting,” he said, and in the end they were allowed to leave. Mary smirked, but while everyone was focused on John she stepped aside. John saw her slip a small package to one of the girls, with Okot watching closely. 

They meandered slowly back to the clinic. “What’s the policy on birth control here?” John asked quietly, when they were halfway there. The stars overhead were the sort you could never see in a city; the milky way was a smear of silver across the sky, the fingerpaint of the gods. 

“Depends on the imam,” she responded after a pause. “Rashad Abed Ali to the north, he is very fierce. If he catches women wearing western clothing he gets very angry. He thinks birth control is an evil. Abdel Al-saddiq to the south, he’s more modern. He thinks girls should learn to read. He won’t scold me.” John nods. 

They leave him alone, locked into the clinic in the night. He has a light - one of the few places in the town with electricity. He stands in the back room, contemplating the AK and his small backpack where it sits on the cot. The fabric is kevlar and threaded through with steel; the zipper is locked shut with a small padlock. There’s a camel back water pouch running down the spine portion. 

It was a gift from Mycroft, delivered by Anthea a week before he left. It sat so oddly in his room in London; here, it already seems a part of the landscape, dusty and scuffed. He opens it and pulls out fresh underwear and a t-shirt to sleep in, then puts the t-shirt back. It’s too hot. He absently pulls out the Sig and checks it, then hauls it along to the small bathroom. Time to get used to always carrying it again, he thinks. 

The water out of the showerhead has only one temperature - warm - and is gravity fed. He wonders how they get it from the Nile up into the container on the roof. There’s not enough power for a pump, he thinks. It could be an Archimedes screw or hand-carried by bucket. He wonders if it’s filtered. It looks clear enough, without sediment, but he tries not to get any in his mouth. He brushes his teeth with water from a bottle. Time enough to ask Mary about water safety in the morning. 

 

 

“I want to learn to be a doctor,” says Bakti shyly two months later. 

“Can you stay late after clinic, an hour every night?” John asks. Bakti nods, his eyes shining. “I’ll teach you.” 

 

 

Mary sees them, heads bent together. John is small and lean and tan, his hair gone a pale blond in the summer sun. Bakti is a tall skinny kid beside him, dark hands on the white paves of the textbook John got a friend to send in from London. “Metatarsal,” Bakti sounds out, and John smiles at him. 

 

 

The air is a little cooler and they sit sharing cinnamon tea on the back step of the clinic, watching the sun set over the desert. Darkness comes, slowly and quickly. John cannot see Mary beside him on the stoop as anything more than a shadow. She leans back, stretches; her breasts press against the fabric of her shirt. “John Wason,” she says in a low thoughtful voice. “What drove you so far from your home, to come here?” 

He is silent; she rolls her head towards him, looking at him over her shoulder. Then her arm comes up and her fingers catch the back of his neck, and she pulls him over to kiss her on her full dark lips. 

 

 

He runs the ultrasound over Okot's belly. Jean-Paul stands beside her, holding her hand. John smiles at them, their eyes intent and wondering as they gaze at the image on the screen. 

 

 

“His name was Sherlock Holmes.” Mary snorts in amusement. “Yes, you may very well laugh. But he was...” John shakes his head where he lies on his back, fingers interlaced behind his head. She leans on her elbow beside him on the cot, resting her head on one hand and studying the scar on his shoulder. It's not a wide cot; they;re crowded together so Mary won't fall off onto the floor. John is stuffed against the wall. Her naked thigh lies sweating draped over his. “I can’t describe him,” John says in a low voice. “He was my best friend. He was rude, and brilliant, and impossible. Nothing I can say will do him justice.” She watches him watch his memories for a long while, seeing reflections of rain and blood in his pale eyes. Then she kisses him, and pulls him up on top of her as she falls backwards, and gives him silence and comfort. 

 

 

John stands with the Sig steady on the man’s face. “Let her go,” he says in a reasonable voice. Mary is quite still, her dark and angry eyes the only movement. The man is sweating. Not even really a man, just a boy. “Let her go,” John says gently. The boy stands there with tremors in his arms, his knees. John is as steady as stone. He is endless, he is the desert and the sand and the air and the sun, he is the darkness and he sees the shift in the boy’s eyes, sees Mary know her death in the boy’s grip on her shoulder, the gun at her head. 

They scrub the wall together after. John leaves the bullet with the boy’s body. An Imam comes, shakes his head, presses his gnarled brown fingers to the dead boy’s heart. The clinic staff stand and watch while the boy is carried away. No-one knows his name. 

 

 

“A girl,” he tells the proud sixteen year old child who has just given birth. Her husband is pacing the waiting room. Her face falls, but her arms cradle the child gently to her breast. His eyes meet Mary’s. She looks a little wistful. 

“Marry me, Mary Morstan,” he says quietly that night, in the darkness. Her laughter is rich and close. “No,” she whispers back. 

 

 

"A boy," he says to Jean-Paul as he comes out of the tiny maternity room. Jean-Paul grins proudly, shouts, jumps in the air. The rest of the family begin to shout and laugh, and the women stream past him to go visit Okot. 

 

 

“Marry me,” he says to Mary, under the summer sun as they unload crates of surgical gloves and antihistamines and IV tubing. She shakes her head, sweat flying off her brow. 

“Madman,” she says with a grin. “Mad English.” 

 

 

Bakti throws the book down on the desk and flips his hands in the air. John looks over with a raised eyebrow; Bakti glances up and looks sheepish. He pats the book as though that would fix any damage. 

John abandons his tremendously slow internet connection and his attempt to update his blog, and swivels in his chair to face the young man. "What's wrong?" 

"I do not understand lymph," Bakti says with a scowl. 

John sighs. "No-one does," he sympathizes. 

 

 

“Marry me,” he says with fierce concern as they stand over a dead girl. Blood streaks the girl's thighs, drips from her ears. She was pregnant and unwed. Her mother found her, dug her up from where they had half-buried her. She was dead by the time her mother half-carried her into the clinic, wailing. 

“Will you stay here, then, in the Sudan?” Her voice is harsh, angry. She has tears on her cheeks. 

“Yes.” His voice is surprised. How could she think otherwise? 

She looks at him, eyes wide. He has, for once, rendered her speechless. 

“Truly?” she whispers it. She needs to know. 

He blinks. “Of course. This is where you are.” 

She is very still, eyes searching his face. “Then yes.” 

She has to help him find a seat before he passes out. 

 

 

She lies on the table while he runs the ultrasound. They both have stupid smiles on their face. John’s smile slips first. 

There’s a brightness where there shouldn’t be. 

“You can’t come,” she says, smiling at him as he stands by the Land Rover, shifting from foot to foot. “They need you here.” He glares at her from under his brows, the bags under his eyes evidence of how little sleep he’s gotten. 

“Come back soon.” He kisses her full on the lips. The driver turns away, shuffling, and coughs. Aunt Lala snickers where she stands behind John. 

Mary looks at Aunt Lala over John’s shoulder. “Take care of him,” she calls; Aunt Lala nods. 

John watches the dust trail leave him. 

 

 

“Melanoma,” she says on the phone. “They’re operating. Instead of chemo. I asked if they could operate.” He grips the phone tight. It hisses with static. 

“John.” her voice is gentle. “John, please.” 

Please let her be all right, he thinks, over and over, but none of it will come out of his mouth. He doesn’t care about the baby. The baby has gone, in one week, from being a treasure and a shining light in his heart to being the parasite that means Mary won’t contemplate drugs. 

He wishes the baby were dead. 

“I love you,” he whispers to Mary. His words travel down the phone line, a hundred and fifty miles away. “I love you.” His tears stay there, caught on the mouthpiece beside his chin. 

 

 

There is nothing but sand. And the sunset. He sits on the back of the clinic and drinks the aragi and wishes someone would come and see, give him the requisite 40 lashes. He does this every night for a week. 

Then he stops, and makes a phone call. 

 

 

He stands at her grave. She had no family here. She was a refugee child, raised in foster care by the Sisters of Mercy, given an English name and educated to be a nurse. And now she lies dead here, and she will be here for the rest of time, next to the children she could not save and the elders of the village she called her own. 

There is a stone at the head of the grave. He wanted flowers, but they don’t do flowers here in the Sudan. It’s not like an English grave. There’s no green grass - down south, maybe, but not here. Not where she lived. Here, there are stones. 

It takes half an hour to walk back to the clinic. The sun is low in the sky. He sees, from the distance, before he gets there - a Land Rover is waiting. It takes time to trudge over, though, adn he has plenty of time to contemplate the truck and its occupants. 

There’s a fresh-faced man standing there by the truck. When the man sees John, he begins pulling out a heavy duffel. Beside him, a woman leans on the Land Rover, texting, looking cool even in the evening of a Sudanese summer. Of course, she’s spent the whole day in a vehicle which looks new enough to have working air conditioning, so perhaps it’s not much of a surprise. 

She looks up as he approaches. Blinks a slow blink. Nods, then goes back to texting. John looks at the strange man. The strange man smiles and holds out his hand to be shaken; John stares. Doesn’t lift his own hand. Instead, he jerks his head towards the clinic door and turns his back to the man, walks over to where someone more important is waiting. 

“Bakti,” he says, nodding at the tall young man in the western-style khakis and white button down. Bakti is crying. He hands John his backpack. John slings it over his shoulder. Bakti steps over and hugs him, a long hug, slapping him on the back and shoulder. John closes his eyes, his arms tight about the tall young man’s shoulders. “You come see me in London, when you get your visa,” he murmurs. “You keep calling and you keep e-mailing with Mike, right? We’ll get you a residency.” Bakti nods sharply, and they separate. 

John turns, looks at the new man. All his other goodbyes are long since said and done. He walks past the man, who stares after him in befuddlement. Anthea is already in the vehicle, sitting there waiting. He gets in beside her, closes the door. The driver is a different man to the one who dropped him here those years ago; he doesn’t speak to this man. The endless Nile village slides by on the left and the endless desert slides by on the right, and they go South to where the plane waits. 

Night is coming on; it’s time to go home.

**Author's Note:**

> This idea, of John joining Medicine Sans Frontiers because he can't bear London anymore - of John seeing Nurse Morstan for the first time and she's this vibrant and amazing woman, and she completely chews him out in front of everyone and they're all nervous because she's only a nurse and he's the Doctor from England - and he falls for her, completely - this has been in my head for ages. 
> 
> I hope you like it. :) This might be the last time we can do a fix like this, where Mary Morstan isn't cannon yet.


End file.
